Does Apple Have a Bruise?

Steve Jobs died a year ago today, and Apple’s done rather well since. Profits have soared and the stock is up eighty per cent. When Jobs passed away, the company’s market capitalization equalled the G.D.P. of Greece. Now it equals that of Switzerland. Fans still camp out for products, which the press still raves about. The new C.E.O., Tim Cook, is popular. If surveys are to be believed, he’s more popular inside One Infinite Loop than Jobs was. He even bears an uncanny sartorial resemblance to his predecessor. The shoes, and the jeans, fit.

Since Jobs’s death, the company hasn’t released anything big and new. But it has built better and sleeker iPhones and iPads, and it’s sold tons of them. Both of those products were things that Jobs imagined, and that he imagined we’d want. Microsoft used to be the most valuable company in the world; now Apple has that title, and it makes more money just from its iPhones than its rival makes on everything.

There’s another part of Jobs’s legacy that is more complicated, however. At the end of his life, Jobs was obsessed with Android, the rival phone operating system. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go to thermonuclear war on this,” he told his biographer, Walter Isaacson. Since then, Apple has launched dozens of lawsuits against Android-phone manufacturers. This summer, it won a billion dollars in damages from Samsung.

Massive wars of choice generally don’t end that well for either side. (“The Cold War is over and Japan won,” the famous saying goes.) Apple is now at war with its suppliers—Samsung makes chips for iPhones—and it faces countersuits and counterclaims. It has also irritated engineers, many of whom believe that technology patents slow down innovation and that litigation is contrary to the spirit of Silicon Valley. The more Apple sues, the more it looks like, to use Jon Stewart’s memorable word, a bunch of “Appholes.”

The obsession with throttling Android, and Google, also led Apple to its worst decision of the year: replacing the Google Maps app on iPhones with one that didn’t work. Apple’s map app, to use a word that Steve Jobs favored, sucked. It directed people into cul-de-sacs and off bridges. And it made people wonder whether such a derailment would have happened under the previous C.E.O.

Jobs, an extreme perfectionist, tore up flawed products right before launch. He worried about the number of screws in a laptop. Here is an example, from Walter Isaacson’s biography, also used in a lovely piece by Malcolm Gladwell, of how much Jobs thought about grammar, and how good his decisions could be. Discussing the company’s “think different” advertising campaign, Isaacson writes, “They debated the grammatical issue: If ‘different’ was supposed to modify the verb ‘think,’ it should be an adverb, as in ‘think differently.’ But Jobs insisted that he wanted ‘different’ to be used as a noun, as in ‘think victory’ or ‘think beauty.’ ”

Has Apple lost its perfectionism? And has it lost it because of an obsession with crushing a rival? Perhaps.

Meanwhile, Apple has not abandoned its commitment to marketing. No one is better, even now, at arousing customer lust. Thefts of iPhones and iPads in New York have climbed by forty per cent in the past year, even as thefts of other electronic devices have dropped. A few weeks ago, Jimmy Kimmel ran an experiment: showing people on the street an iPhone 4 and telling them it was the soon-to-be-released iPhone 5. They loved it, of course. The actual launch came off flawlessly.

And yet, that success raises another, even more important question, one that Steve Jobs suggested while speaking with Isaacson about why big technology companies eventually crumble. “The company does a great job, innovates and becomes a monopoly or close to it in some field, and then the quality of the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers.” In other words: the company gets really good at selling existing things not making new ones.

Is this happening to Apple under Tim Cook? It’s too early to tell. The innovations in recent product launches are real. And Cook surely deserves more than a year to show that he can make something spectacular. It is noteworthy, however, that he hasn’t done so yet.

Transitions from icons to their designated successors often don’t work that well. Think about Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki. Or Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Or Henry Ford and his son. We know a lot about what Apple is like without its inspirational founder. Here’s what we don’t know: Can Apple, after Steve Jobs, still think different?

Disclosure: I helped found The Atavist, a technology start-up whose investors include people connected to Facebook, Google, IAC, Hewlett-Packard, and other technology companies.

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